Meet Rust, the other sandbox alpha working its magic on Steam

DayZ isn’t the only alpha sandbox game currently selling in a very high numbers of Steam.

Indeed, while Dean Hall’s zombie sim may be grabbing all the headlines there’s another game that’s also “firing shots” at traditional publishing models – Rust.

Developed by the team behind the successful Gary’s Mod, Rust places gamers into a sandbox world of survival where the environment and rival players pose a constant threat.

The alpha, which was released a week before DayZ on December 11th, sold 150,000 copies in its first two weeks. It costs £14.99 and currently sits at No.2 in the Steam charts behind DayZ.

“Sales have been strong. Stronger than strong,” Facepunch’s Garry Newman said. “We really have been knocked on our arses by sales.

“Our plan was to release the alpha on to Steam in a low-key way and slowly build up steam until the game was in a decent state. But our player counts have exploded our wildest dreams.

“So we’ve obviously felt a bit shell-shocked by the popularity explosion we’ve seen and it’s scrambled our plans a bit. We’ve had to work with GSP’s to bring more servers online. This is something we didn’t think we’d have to do for a while because we thought we’d only need about ten servers.

“We’re going to be working hard to help you justify spending that $20 on our early alpha game and hope you enjoy the progress we make over the coming year.”

As for a potential console, release, Newman added: “A console release isn’t out of the question. But it’s not something we’re going to be dedicating lots of time to right now.”

Which pretty much mirrors the situation with DayZ. With Hall recently saying that his game is unlikely to even exit alpha until the end of the year at the earliest, any potential console release at this stage seems a long, long way off.

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